What you, As a Business Owner, Must Know about UX Design

Introduction

What is UX design? It stands for “User Experience Design” and refers to the field concerned with the perception and feelings users have about the experiences they go through when they interact with an app, a website, a digital channel, etc. It carefully examines user needs and behaviours to improve the efficiency and ease of use for completing specific tasks. Doesn’t sound too complex, does it?

But once you begin working with a prospective designer in an idiom like this, it doesn’t become any simpler, for it’s not a small task to make your website user-centered. Equally, you need not to be overwhelmed. As a business owner, here are some tips from us at Trent & Hanover that you will greatly benefit from learning about UX design.

UX Is Primarily About Users

This is what it’s concerned with – not your website, your products, or even your services. Your users are what matter. It’s an easy trap to fall into, but many designers and business owners alike place far too much emphasis on design – which, beautiful as it can be to the eye if focused on solely, can result in ignoring what the users actually need or want.

After all, as a business owner, it must be you who really knows your customers and target audience. One example of this is the discovery that, as digital natives, millennials tend to have high expectations of user interfaces; but, due to their tendency to multitask too much, they are also error-prone.

The bottom line? Ensure you familiarise your designer with your ideal customer base, then use all the information you have about them to ensure your website or digital channel is designed in such a manner to tailor to their likes, needs, and goals.

UX Design Is A Process

Remember, that’s what it is – not an end product. At no point can you say “We’re now done with UX design”, for no website in the world is complete, utterly user-centered either the first time or all the time. There are several reasons for this, but one is that the principles and trends of design generally change over time; at one time, the trend is a flat, material web design, then as the trends shifted it became a modern, avant-garde design.

In short, you don’t want your website to ever appear obsolete, which means you’ll have to update it every now and then.

Perhaps more important to remember is the fact that the demands and needs of customers can change very rapidly. The beauty of UX design is that it lets you create a website imperfect when it begins, but evolves over time to deliver accessibility and true value, resulting in highly satisfied users.

Customer Feedback and Testing

The best way to find out if your UX design process is having the desired effect is to test it. Research and A/B testing are handy during both the UX building and design process; keep in mind that you can also do comparisons with your website using proven UX design best practices. In addition to tests, you also need to listen carefully to customer feedback at all times, even directly after your site’s launch. At the very heart of your entire UX design process must be customer feedback; for example, it should go without saying that you might need to rethink your design idiom if your customers tell you repeatedly that your website is difficult to navigate.

In conclusion, always remember that as the business owner, your role is not merely to pay designers to ensure your site is user-centered. As the owner, it is in fact you who knows your target audience best, and further to this end, in knowing that UX design is at its best when done as a process in which customer feedback and real testing are pushed to the forefront – and, in being aware that it is primarily about the users – you can thus be more involved in the building of your website.